Places

The Salton Sea

We spent part of last weekend at the Salton Sea, a strange place in the California desert just north of the Mexican border. It’s a lake that shouldn’t be there, and now that it’s there, it’s a lake that can’t go anywhere but. It was an engineering accident that created this place. In 1904, a dike broke and the Colorado river flooded the 228 feet below sea level plain: no way in and no way out means that the lake just keeps on getting saltier.

I’ve been wanting to see this place, once the promise of a recreational paradise, now only the deserted remains of 1950s leisure kitsch, since we met the San Diego artist Kim Stringfellow at a dinner party and heard lake’s fascinating story. Stringfellow has spent countless hours documenting and researching the history of California’s largest lake, and her work on that project is now a book: Greetings From the Salton Sea.